It’s interesting how the attack on the Libyan embassy that resulted in the death of the US ambassador to Libya went from being an attack by a spontaneous and unorganized mob of angry Muslims pissed at a YouTube video to a terrorist attack by individuals who may have had connections to al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda affiliates. The question is, was this a deliberate attempt by the Obama administration to avoid labelling this a terrorist attack for political reasons, or was it simply the result of Western prejudices and the media jumping too quickly on the ‘Arab world is full of violent, angry Muslims ready to kill people at the drop of a hat’ bandwagon before all the fact were known? Maybe a bit of both?

Update (9/27/12, 3:45pm): According to a recent Yahoo News article, it looks as if the Obama administration may have known all along that it was most likely a terrorist attack organized and committed by extremists, many of whom were from outside of Libya. And yet many of President Obama’s top aides still “argued for days afterward that the violence was linked to an Internet video that ridicules Islam,” and many news agencies apparently followed suit. Way to perpetuate the ‘angry Muslim mob’ stereotype while knowing all along that the reality was most likely completely different and far more complicated.